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Here’s the issue I’m concerned with. Franz Kafka was a citizen of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His work was published in Germany and around the world. Bohemia became part of Czechoslovakia, Germany, then Czechoslovakia again, and now the Czech Republic. Kafka died in 1924. Finally, the Mobileread servers, where we download his work, are located in Canada and I live in the US.
I want to respect Kafka’s rights--well, his heirs and assign’s rights, really--but do I have a right to download his work from Mobileread? I feel certain that Canadians have a right to download it, but I honestly don’t know for certain if I do because Canadian copyright laws are different than US copyright laws, because every country has its own version of fair use.
The “leaked” information about this treaty has no details about what other countries are at the table. Will the US law accept Canada’s idea of a fair copyright? Or will Canada accept the US idea? It occurs to me that the two Senators who made the leak may be trying to kill the treaty before it can be negotiated, politics being what they are and treaty negotiations are seldom done in public.
The final issue, I think, is how important is it for me to know whether I’m entitled to download one of Kafka’s works. It’s hard for me to see how I could possibly be expected to obey a law if I don’t know how to apply it, so my own answer to that is that I need to know, somehow, what is legal and what it not. As this thread shows, there is no universal agreement about what is fair and what isn’t. None of this was a problem before the Internet connected all of us, but now that it has, how do we proceed?
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